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Green Folder?

Q

Qinsp

2[H]4U
Joined
Jan 7, 2011
Messages
2,154
Thinking of building a Green Folder.

I have some solar panels and controllers left over from one of the kid's science fair projects.

But ...

1) How hard is it for an idiot expert electrical guy to power a motherboard with 12v-19v of DC power?

2) What is the least possible power (in watts) to fold BigAdv? Dual E5-2xxx? Dual HE 6xxx Opteron? The lower the watts, the smaller the batteries and the fewer the panels.

This is just for fun. I really don't expect it to work. The "Solar Car" went <5mph on a sunny day with 400w.
 
How your system run when is cloudy or after sunset? Then you need a lot of battery to store the energy and at least 800W panels for consuming and storing at the same time. Not cost effective. And I also heard that the process to make a solar panel and shipping the panels to your house generate more pollution than benefits you get out of it.
 
No, this is not logical.

I'm doing this for entertainment.

We did the math on the solar car before we started, and determined it was useless...






But it was fun driving it around the block. :D
 
I like your thinking. I know there are 12v power supplies for car pc, perhaps see if there is something you could do there that is large enough? Or, multiples. IDK.
 
If I had the space for it, I would already have a few wind turbines at least set up and partially powering my farm, and probably a solar array as well. The problem is, the ROI on green energy just isn't quite there yet, especially with solar.

If I were going to do something like this, I'd grid wire the whole system. There are just too many variables to run solely on solar or wind.

The lowest power bigadv folder would probably some sort of dual Intel 2011 machine, but you would still be looking at ~250W 24/7. That would take a lot of solar panels and a lot of sunny days and a ton of batteries to run solely on solar.
 
musky said:
If I had the space for it, I would already have a few wind turbines at least set up and partially powering my farm, and probably a solar array as well. The problem is, the ROI on green energy just isn't quite there yet, especially with solar.
Click to expand...

Depends on where you live...
 
dual E5 is the most efficient out there at the moment, my dual 8 core running on the asus Z9PE WS board pulls 248w from the wall (240v), dual LGA 1366 would need about 280w, even with a gold PSU and using the asus Z8NA.

What i don't know is how far down the E5 tree you can go before not being able to do bigadv, my CPU's are 2665's @ 2.3 and they do 8101 in 21-23 minutes tpf
 
I would think folding was the EXACT OPOSITE of being green haha. Good luck though! Could fold soOoOoOo much more with a renewable energy resource...
 
Question is, how to run a computer off DC voltage that is made for an ATX powersupply without chewing a lot power by converting DC 19v>AC 120v> DC 12v > DC 5v+3.3v?

Can I shortcut a PSU after the primary step down trans and diodes? Or how does a PSU work?

I can make 115v DC (5 panels in series, 500w), but worried it might fry the PSU by feeding it DC.
 
Get a laptop - the inputs are DC for them. Otherwise, I wouldn't know where to start on converting a normal ATX PSU to DC.
 
musky said:
Get a laptop - the inputs are DC for them. Otherwise, I wouldn't know where to start on converting a normal ATX PSU to DC.
Click to expand...

Interesingly enough, the input voltage on a modern laptop is 19v just like my panels. You just have to worry if the "brains" are in the charger or the mobo. Overcharging Li-Polymer is very exciting. Not in a good way though.

Unless somebody knew for sure the charging logic was in the mobo, I'd be REALLY caution. You could get hurt pretty good when it goes off.
 
musky said:
Get a laptop - the inputs are DC for them. Otherwise, I wouldn't know where to start on converting a normal ATX PSU to DC.
Click to expand...

Interesingly enough, the input voltage on a modern laptop is 19v just like my panels. You just have to worry if the "brains" are in the charger or the mobo. Overcharging Li-Polymer is very exciting. Not in a good way though.

Unless somebody knew for sure the charging logic was in the mobo, I'd be REALLY cautious. You could get hurt pretty good when it goes off.

EDIT - I'm pretty sure the logic is in the battery pack. I remember seeing a circuit inside when I tore down a laptop battery. But I would hate to be wrong about it.
 
There are CAR-PC PSU's that run on unregulated DC, for example I have one that runs from 6-24v DC. You want to find something like this, as they are DC-DC and do not worry about rectifying to AC and back again. You would just need to find one big enough...

Yu can get a chip off the shelf to charge/manage li-po batteries as well, although for something like this I would just get some cheap deep cycle 12v batteries from walmart or something. They will be a lot cheaper and are a lot 'easier' to manage/charge. You could just probably wire then parallel to the input of the dc-dc psu and be fine...
 
If you have a river going though your property then a water wheel could get you some electricity, if you have a river that goes down hill then a generator can get you around 10KW per meter of drop.

I'd love to see a 4P farm all running an green energy.

If any of you are planing on getting solar panels then make sure they pay them selfs off within 10 years.
 
Spazturtle said:
...
If any of you are planing on getting solar panels then make sure they pay them selfs off within 10 years.
Click to expand...

It depends on what your electric billing table is like.

Around here, it goes up by usage, Tier 1, ... Tier 5. Tier 5 is $0.31 per kWh + taxes.

Paying off panels at Tier 5 is short. $2 per watt if you do it yourself. Triple that for true average output, or $6 per 24hr watt. 1000w is $6000. Cost of 24h kW, is about $8. Which is about $1000 per kW/year for power at Tier 5. So 6 years break even if you do it yourself.

But there may be rebates and tax advantages that drop that significantly.

If you are at 0.11/kWh, it takes over 15 years, minimum. Cost of capital makes it so it never pays itself off. ie - if you took the money and invested it, it would make more money than the solar panels. Panels also drop production about 1% per year..

What does it tell you? Going 100% solar in a tiered billing system is dumb. Put up just enough panels to drop a tier or two.

The only thing that has stopped us from going solar is fire code restrictions. The fire dept hates solar technology, even though house fires are really rare today and everyone here is required to have sprinkler systems.
 
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